Voice over IP (VoIP) - Solution Case Study

  

XYZ Company has decided to interconnect its PBXs and key system over the IP WAN, as opposed to using the T1 and fractional T1 connections. Therefore, your goal in this case study is to create a design that places a router at each XYZ Company location and to specify the router interfaces used to connect remote routers. Also, each XYZ Company location needs connections to its local CO as follows:

In addition to the required solution, you also need to calculate the required voice bandwidth, the links in this converged network solution also need to transport data. The data bandwidth requirements are as follows:

Demonstrate in your design how the router at each XYZ Company location connects into its local CO. This VoIP design lays the foundation for eventually replacing the PBXs and key system units with IP telephony components such as the Cisco CallManager

Although multiple solutions exist for the design scenario presented, the following is a suggested solution that meets the design criteria. The router located at the XYZ Company HQ needs WAN connectivity with each remote office. Based on the bandwidth requirements calculated, we have the following voice bandwidth requirements for each of these WAN links:

In addition to voice, these intersite links need to carry data. The data requirements specified in the case study were:

To accommodate both voice and data, we sum the required bandwidth (that is, the voice bandwidth plus the data bandwidth) for these links to calculate each link's total required bandwidth:

Although we could select from various WAN technologies to interconnect these sites (for example, Frame Relay, Point-to-Point Protocol [PPP], or Asynchronous Transfer Mode [ATM]), this suggested solution uses PPP links. The headquarters connects to Remote Office 1 using two T1s. Two T1s actually provide more bandwidth than the required 2.794 Mbps. However, these two T1s allow room for future growth. In this design, the two T1s are combined into a single logical link, using Multilink PPP (MLPPP)

 .

The headquarters connects to Remote Office 2 using a fractional T1, running at 512 kbps. Again, the allocated bandwidth is a little more than the required 465.68 kbps, thus allowing for future growth.

The routers at each site should also connect to their local CO. As a best practice, once we exceed eight connections, we should choose digital interfaces instead of analog interfaces, due to cost considerations. Therefore, this suggested design selected the following CO connections for the XYZ Company routers: